Monday, April 29, 2013

BeagleBone Black arrived today!

I received my BeagleBone Black today!
Cheap camera shot

The kernel date for the image on the eMMC matched the latest build date, so I did not try to flash a whole new image. I did, however, run 'opkg update' and 'opkg upgrade', which had quite a list of packages. 

I then started on getting an EDIMax (EW-7811Un) USB WiFi adapter working. I plugged it in and checked 'dmesg'. The kernel module was complaining that it could not load a binary firmware file. So a little searching on the internet, and a couple of false starts later, I found a working binary at:


so I copied it to the /lib/firmware/rtlwifi folder.

The next step was to add my wireless router settings to the wpa_supplicant.conf file. I did this by entering the following command:

# wpa_passphrase mywireless_ssid "secretpassphrase" >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

The adapter associates with the access point after a system reboot and/or removing and reinserting the adapter. Success! Well, not quite. By default, access point association does not imply getting a dhcp lease.

So this is where it goes all wrong....I decided to run 'opkg upgrade' before finishing this step, however, some way through the downloads, it could not fetch any more packages. The update still seemed to be doing the configurations, so I thought it would just allow me to run upgrade again. Nope, when it got to the end it complained about bonescript.socket not listening and other bonescript post processing errors. I tried to run 'opkg upgrade' a couple more times, but nothing changed. I decided to reboot to reset the network. Doh! Now, on boot, it shows LED D2 for a couple seconds, then D2, D3, and D4 all light up and stay on. Time to reflash eMMC......tomorrow.

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